Top discovery channels in online user behaviour

As part of the ongoing reseach the Spotlight project is doing on how to improve discoverability of digitised collections, a couple of weeks ago we blogged asking for suggestions of recent studies on online user behaviour in resource discovery and add them to a Google document we set up.

These findings were also discussed at the second Spotlight Expert group meeting on 16 October and here are some of the highlights from Sero:

“There has been a number of significant publications in this space, with the Jisc ‘Visitors and Residents’ study currently ongoing. However, some literature is now dated and so of doubtful reliability given the emergence of new services (for example, social media) within and beyond the HE community, general changes in online user behaviour (such as the growth of mobile) and demographic shifts towards increasingly born digital undergraduates.

KEY REPORTS
The most useful reports used in compiling this synthesis have therefore been:

The latter observation highlights the biggest gap in the information and findings that can usefully guide the Spotlight project. We could simply assume that university teachers select materials for teaching purposes and make recommendations to learners using exactly the methods and skills that they deploy as experienced researchers.

However, discussion with the expert group confirmed our suspicion that other factors are likely to be at play; for example, the role of validation processes and formally approved reading lists in determining what is recommended to students and the extent to which lecturers might be encouraging students to engage in collective resource discovery as part of the learning process.

The range of things happening in the teaching space, potentially impacted by the role of VLEs and by practices emerging through MOOCs, was therefore agreed to merit further investigation, perhaps beyond the scope of the current project.

TOP DISCOVERY CHANNELS
Our synthesis of the literature suggests a dozen or so channels to discovery, which may be used as they stand or wrapped up in more complex behaviours, to be taken account of if we are to enhance discovery and sustain discoverability of scholarly resources.

Whilst some are reported as particular to beginning undergraduates (for example, family and friends) or to more experienced researchers (such as citation chaining), it seems that many are in use across the spectrum of user ‘personas’, not least the global search engines epitomised by Google.

The literature provides many strong messages, not least about the importance of Google, Wikipedia and YouTube. However there are behaviours that lack clarity, especially relating to specialised tools for finding stuff, perhaps on account of:

• The questions asked – the persistent research challenge regarding the way the research was presented and phrased to participants, perhaps in this field exacerbated by the absence of a common way of describing ‘discovery’ process(es)

• The technology fug – the question of underlying understanding of the software applications referenced on the parts of both researchers and respondents; this is an especial concern given the panoply (or confusion) of ‘finding aids’ offered by curators and their suppliers and the associated cycle of change (e.g. OPAC to Discovery Layer)

Finally, the Expert Group expressed a concern that formal research cycles and digital development lifetimes are, to a certain degree, incompatible, carrying the likelihood that research is reporting on what has been with a less than strong likelihood that it still persists.

Nevertheless, there is much in the literature that can inform the Spotlight quest to ensure reliable and persistent discoverability of resources and also to increase the likelihood of discovery in terms of channels and behaviours favoured by target users.

As well as further investigating some of the grey areas highlighted in this post, our next task is to map the key behaviours on to possible interventions that might be driven by curators (whether individual academics or entities such as archives and libraries) and / or supported through national interventions.”

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